Posted
by
Soulskillon Wednesday April 21, 2010 @06:31AM
from the playing-catch-up dept.

NNUfergs writes with news that Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group has acquired Turbine Inc., creators of Lord of the Rings Online, Asheron's Call, and Dungeons & Dragons Online. Terms were not disclosed, but the Boston Globe claims the price was somewhere around $160 million.
"Warner Bros. Interactive has bought a number of game development houses in recent years, in a bid to become a major power in video gaming. In 2007, the company purchased TT Games, a British firm that develops family-friendly products like Lego Star Wars and Lego Batman. In 2009, Warner Bros. bought the assets of bankrupt Chicago game company Midway, maker of the popular Mortal Kombat games. And earlier this year, it acquired a majority stake in Rocksteady Studios, another British developer, which created the hit game Batman: Arkham Asylum. ... Acquiring Turbine will give Warner Bros. total control over all future video games based on author J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved Lord of the Rings novels. Turbine holds an exclusive license to make an Internet-based game based on the books, while last year, Warner Bros. won a license to make non-Internet-based Tolkien video games."

Acquiring Turbine will give Warner Bros. total control over all future video games based on author J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved Lord of the Rings novels.

Well, Warner Bros is the parent company of New Line Cinema [wikipedia.org], The Lord of the Rings film studio. Although I'm uneasy that Warner could roll out trashy videogames, I don't think it's too evil for studios to try to retain those kinds of rights as long as they exercise them and I suspect WB will.

Seriously though, if a full blown warrior with a bow and axe comes by some random dude "Got any work for me?" it is FAR more likely to be something like "Nice axe you got there, I need someone to chop me some firewood." or "Any good with that bow? I'd pay good money for some pelts" than "I need you to on a sacred quest for the Sword of Doom in the haunted castle of Skul-Ugir". Realism is not very desirable in an RPG.

DDO was a normal pay to play MMORPG up until the Free to Play option was added back in September. With that in mind, I don't see that DDO would lose the free to play option after all the good it did for the game in terms of profitability. There are potential problems, but after thinking about it, there really is more chance for this being a positive for the game rather than a negative. At the very least, DDO MAY get a better working budget, rather than having LotR getting the most attention.

Has any MMO game company that was acquired by another actually ended up doing better over time? Or more generally, has any game company of any sort done better?Sort of has me worried. There's always an exception where someone might to well after being bought out. But I can't help but imagine that WB will note that they have some redundant job positions that could be removed (artists, modelers, designers, qa, IT, etc).

What I like most about LotRO is that it feels like Lord of the Rings books and much of t

I still play Asheron's Call casually and like it, especially with the new low level experience. AC is the only MMO world that feels like a real world to me, not just a bunch of different theme park zones put together. That said, I'm no fanboy; it has had (and I'm sure still has) a number of flaws. I hope that it sticks around, or that someday another MMO will come close to the experience of the AC world but with a modernized client.

I've played other games like WoW and LoTRO, and enjoyed them for different

Seriously, if you have kids, you should try it for a month. No PvP, but still - PvE where you actually can have a piano drop on a bad guy is pretty frikkin hilarious. Then one day the game becomes a grind like any other. But the first month is pretty damn fun.

What was stopping you before? The exorbitant cost of free? The days and days of downloading (Turbine's tiered download can have you up and playing DDO or LOTRO in an hour or two)? Your enjoyment of spending 45 minutes to cross a continent for one quest or drop? An unnatural desire to collect ten of something and turn it in (rare, but not unheard of in DDO)?

I've played nearly every MMO out there, either in beta, or as a subscriber, or on a trial. DDO does a few things differently (real-time twitch combat normalized for your character level, instanced dungeons for all quests and "adventure areas"), and it's worth a look for that alone. If you're a loner, it's become a functional game with the addition of hirelings and Solo difficulty. (It used to be somewhere between "eh" and unbearable solo.) If you can find a good group that isn't going to zerg rush every dungeon and is willing to let you read the text and let you enjoy the story, it's truly a sublime experience.

Warner Bros. isn't all Looney Tunes, and even if it were, you got a problem with Looney Tunes? I promise you, the kids at your school won't make fun of you for playing something from WB, and if they do, remind them that WB also makes things like The Matrix. (The two rumored "sequels" of this fine film are figments of your imagination - malicious code inserted into the Matrix to degrade your understanding of your place in it.)

If you hate DDO, you're out zero dollars and about as much time as it takes to watch whatever derivative schlock Hollywood's cranking out this month. If you love it, you set your subscription price (nothing, buy-what-you-want or all-you-can-conquer) and have at it. Either way, unless you're willing to cop to COMPLETE publisher zealotry (Sony, after the rootkit incident, does not get a DIME of my money, but I'll still kick around FreeRealms), you risk so little by trying it, it's objectively stupid not to.:)

AC, I wish I could bet you money on this, mainly due to the fact that your position is SO unreasonable as to be laughable. People still play SW:G, ferchrissake, and that game's been gutted, re-gutted, and lobotomized. The only thing that drives away EVERY LAST PLAYER is shutting down the servers, and even that doesn't always do it.

If you're trolling, I bit hard and will readily admit it, but if you're not, I'm glad you're staying out of DDO. I'm sure your skill at predicting the future will help you find

Of course, many of the character names (Gandalf, Frodo, Bilbo...), and some of the plotlines are from ancient Norse mythology, so they're public domain. Not that that will stop WB using legal and financial threats to stop people using them.

LOTRO had quite a bit of hype behind it on launch, but never really took off (wasn't sufficiently different from WoW to make an impact...)

LotR:Conquest could have been great was rushed out before it was finished...

LotR:White Council died quietly.

They weren't spectacular, but my favorites Battle for Middle-Earth I and II (from back when EA held the license) were pretty solid RTS's, since they were essentially reskins of C&C. Considering what EA have done to C&C since then, its probably a good thing

LOTRO had quite a bit of hype behind it on launch, but never really took off (wasn't sufficiently different from WoW to make an impact...)

What makes you say LOTRO didn't really take off? Multiple expansions later, it's still a very cool game with tons of players (though Turbine doesn't release subscriber numbers). If you mean that it isn't as popular as WoW, I'm sure you're right. But with 11 active servers (including decent European presence) and a 4 year run so far, I'd argue that it definitely "took

Let's not forget it was Warner that bough Atari in the 80's and proceeded to run it into the ground. They certain bring lot's of capital and ability to score popular media franchises. They also bring to the table a slew of studio heads and producers who want to get their fingers in everything.